Thanatomania

A new book and an old movie. Both about death. The desire for death. And, naturally, the Rolling Stones.



Sway, by Zachary Lazar, is about the late-Sixties confluence of the Stones, Charles Manson, and Kenneth Anger. A strange story by a writer with a very visual style, it could have been better, but is worth reading anyway.



Performance, on the other hand, could not be better. With Jagger, James Fox, and Anita Pallenberg - who figures prominently in Sway - it’s life as it should be: a total fucking fog.

But foggy or not, I’ve got a bad feeling these days, and not just from the art. There are a lot of people in this country who are no more prepared for change now than they were in 1968. The next few months might be hard to watch.

The Fall of Conservatism

George Packer had an interesting article in the May 26 New Yorker entitled “The Fall of Conservatism.” Its subtitle was: “Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” Although Packer is usually reliable, it’s pretty clear he missed the point here. Selfishness is not an idea.

Beirut

I don't know what kind of music Jacques-Henri Lartigue liked. I don't know if he liked music at all. But if he did, I'm pretty sure he would have liked the band Beirut. If you haven't already heard it, check out The Flying Club Cup. Strange and good.


Jacques-Henri Lartigue, The ZYX24 Takes Off, Rouzat, 1910

Although they may have missed a bet on their choice of album art.

Gray City

Octavia Street, 2008

too late now . . .

The Stranger

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Albert Camus, 1937

When I first read The Stranger, what I liked most about it was the existential cool of its protagonist Meursault. He cared for no one, not his mother nor his mistress nor God nor even himself, it appeared. A philosophical hero to rebellious kids everywhere.

I read it again the other day. And what struck me this time was not Meursault’s alienation, but his sensuality. Everything he does, from his mother’s funeral to the murder on the beach, arises from it. Even as he is about to be convicted and condemned, he’s thinking how good life feels:

“In the end, all I remember is that while my lawyer went on talking, I could hear through the expanse of chambers and courtrooms an ice cream vendor blowing his tin trumpet out in the street. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed.”

But I guess what interests me most is how much like Meursault I’ve ended up. It’s one thing to admire an author or a character or a philosophy when you’re too young really to have a clue about it. But it’s another to come upon that character at the other end of things and recognize yourself.

Gray City

Palace of Fine Arts, 2005

This Man Is Insane

Jeff Riedel/New York Times

Cowboys

I didn’t care one way or the other about Richard Prince's Spiritual America show, which received some less-than-totally-enthusiastic reviews when it was at the Guggenheim earlier this year. What did interest me was the story of Jim Krantz.

Krantz, a photographer who took at least one of the Marlboro pics appropriated by Prince - that’s it on the poster - claims to have been shocked, on dropping into the Guggenheim one day, to discover his photograph hanging there with Prince's name on it. Next thing you know, there he was in the New York Times: "I'm not a mean person, and I'm not a vindictive person. I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding."

I mention this now because I’ve got a cough I can’t seem to kick. And because it was guys like Krantz who, in my wasted youth, helped persuade me that cigarette smoking was about the coolest thing I could do next to getting drunk and abusing my horse.

I know we all have to earn a living. And I know sometimes the choices aren’t that great. But things have to be pretty dire to justify lending yourself to an enterprise as corrupt as the marketing of cigarettes. Maybe Krantz had a reason. Maybe he didn’t. But something about his demand for recognition leads me to believe he never even thought about it.

Where She Lived

"Clinton Touts White Support"

Surely the headline of the campaign so far, and one that perfectly illustrates the increasingly despicable Hillary's willingness to do or say literally anything to win.

The white support in question was allegedly revealed by an Associated Press poll which, she said, "found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There's a pattern emerging here.”

Despicable is really too kind. That's an appeal to racism, plain and simple. And I'd bet there's plenty of it out there, just waiting to be summoned. Guess we'll find out.

Where She Lived

Where She Lived

Where She Lived

Reasons To Be Cheerful

#9 This just in. Andrew Hetherington has been tapped for the prestigious Oppy, awarded annually by the American Academy of Opticians for the scariest glasses in New York. Go Jacko!

#10 Did you see Nancy Franklin’s description in last week’s New Yorker of reality TV as an opportunity “to watch real people at a safe distance”? Just like the blogosphere.

#11 Awesome Ideas You Might Want to Reconsider: David Alan Harvey’s upcoming road trip, on which, with the help of several thousand of his closest friends, he will take America’s temperature by photographing its families. A rectal thermometer if I ever heard of one. Although, with all the joyous festivities for the 50th anniversary of Steichen’s Family of Man just a few years ago, he may know something we don’t.

#12 The runner-up for this week’s Quote of the Month is the always lucid Jim Johnson: "I have not an will not vote because it seems to me that you cannot determine the worth of ideas I think the the worth of ideas by majority vote."

#13 And our winner, Cara Phillips: “I fear that the world is starting to lack irony.” So true, Cara, so true.

Holy Shit

Gert van Duinen, Romanogothic, 2008

No, this isn't an outtake from Photoshop Disasters. It's one of the photos rated highest in "interestingness" for April 2008 on Flickr. So if you didn't get around to reading Virginia Heffernan's New York Times Magazine article last Sunday, maybe you should do it now. And God help us all. It's a viral aesthetic, loose in the land.

People (in Pictures)

Wijnanda Deroo, Adler Hotel, Green Room, Sharon Springs, 2005

Is it better to have people in your pictures, or not? I guess that’s kind of a dumb question. For me, anyway, the best pictures are those that have something human in them. The best pictures are those that are human. But human doesn’t necessarily mean people.


Wijnanda Deroo, Columbia Hotel, Sharon Springs, 2005

Wijnanda Deroo, for example, photographs empty rooms, rooms without people, but rooms from which the people have not been gone for long. In the best of them, that absence becomes emotional content. And the pictures are beautiful. Beyond the obvious beauty of their color and light, they are sensuous, tactile, and complete in themselves. If a little cold, in the way pictures without people sometimes are.


Bert Teunissen, Castelnau #1, 1996

But if you think they might be better with people in them, you should have a look at Bert Teunissen’s Domestic Interiors. (They’re hard to avoid these days, anyway.) I don't know what's wrong with me, but I can’t seem to get behind Teunissen’s pictures. And the reason, I think, is the people in them.


Bert Teunissen, Blackwaterfoot #120, 2006

There’s something weirdly unrealized about Teunissen’s people. It’s not that their presence in the pictures is casual or accidental - the rooms in which they appear are their own - but they’re not the real subject, either. Teunissen’s real subject is the place, or a concept of the past that is supported by the place. And that confusion infects the pictures themselves. They’d be better without the people.